Sara Elizabeth Low

Poise, and a Silly Streak, Too

For Sara Elizabeth Low, a career as a flight attendant was a birthright. Family vacations meant piling in the back of her father's small plane and heading from Batesville, Ark., to the Gulf Coast or Rocky Mountains. "Sara didn't think there was too much difference between being in the plane and being in a car," said her mother, Bobbie Low.

Poised, collected, yet prone to sudden streaks of silliness — a personality to calm even the most enraged traveler. And her job sated her wanderlust, her need for cosmopolitan glamor.

"She would call us from the different destinations and give us a hard time," said her older sister, Alyson, a teacher in Fayetteville, Ark. "In the summer she'd phone from San Francisco or Vancouver because she loved that she had to wear a sweater, rubbing it in about how hot and humid it is in Arkansas."

Yet one aspect of the itinerant life wore on Sara: in her first two years as a flight attendant she had about two dozen roommates. So at age 28 she had finally found a place of her own in the Beacon Hill area of Boston, the city from which she boarded Flight 11. "It had a fireplace and wooden floors," Alyson said. "Our mother went to Boston in the summer to help her clean it up, and it was going to be a real home."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on December 6, 2001.

Despite having earned advanced degrees in banking and finance from the University of Arkansas, Sara E. Low was dedicated to her career with American Airlines. And the 29-year-old flight attendant was stationed along the eastern seaboard--a part of the nation she adored.

"She absolutely loved the airlines and helping people," her father, Mike, said Wednesday from his home in Batesville, Ark.